On Tue, 10 Jan 2023 at 16:26, Markus Armbruster <[email protected]> wrote:
> Peter Maydell <[email protected]> writes:
> > Does it actually require '.' on the PATH, or does it just want
> > a qemu-img binary on the PATH? (eg your distro one in /usr/bin).
> > I don't have '.' on my PATH and it works for me.
>
> Do we want to use qemu-img, qemu-system-x86_64 and so forth from PATH,
> or the one in the build tree?
There's no guarantee there is one in the build tree at all.
I usually use these like
(cd build && ../configure)
make -C build vm-build-openbsd
in which case it doesn't need to build anything in the build
tree at all (neither qemu-system-x86_64 nor qemu-img).
It's nice to be able to do "test this build on *BSD" with
a known-good QEMU running the VM rather than having the
code-under-test affecting both the outer QEMU and the
build-and-make-check running inside the VM.
> The former could well be old, which feels like a potential source of
> problems.
In practice we only use it for very simple operations
("create a qcow2 image" and "resize this qcow2 file"),
so using the distro qemu-img has never been an issue for me.
I think I have in the past run into problems because the
system's qemu-system-x86_64 was super-old, but it was easy
to just build a known-good QEMU version and put that on
the PATH. (And now that system has had a host distro
upgrade, so I have gone back to using the system binary.)
thanks
-- PMM
